of senior fellows and sci-fi (sf/sf!)

Music: Kirlian Camera: Still Air (Aria Immobile) (2000)

As I detailed in the previous post, I've been thinking about a course I'm developing for next spring for the College of Communication Senior Fellows program, which is an honors program designed to give gifted upperclassfolks a more intimate and challenging classroom experience. I've never taught one, but I'm told the class is conducted like a graduate seminar with adjusted expectations. I'm sharing the description I developed, and then after that, some thoughts and concerns about the course (and content). Here goes:

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Is Communication (Science) Fiction?

Whether we figure "communication" as the exchange of information, a form of symbolic inducement, a process of understanding, or the means by which we exchange, induce, and understand, each definition is informed by what John Durham Peters describes as a centuries old "dream of communication as the mutual communion of souls." This philosophy of communication seminar grapples with the dream of communion through the idiom of science fiction. The goal is to help participants not only come up with their own answer to the titular question of the class, but perhaps more importantly, to help students toward a stronger understanding of what the question means.

As an idiom, science fiction references various attempts in the domain of popular culture to speculate about the future. Although for most of us "sci-fi" is synonymous with galactic battles, planetary exploration, and spaceships, a dominant theme is the possibility of communicating with extraterrestrial intelligences or "aliens." Read as a social commentary, we can substitute the figure of the alien with "other people," such that the theme is also a question: can human beings communicate at all? The question is not as simple as it initially seems. The College of Communication itself is premised on a positive answer to this question, however, science fiction asks us to consider the alternative.

In this seminar we take up the alternative by studying communication theory and speculative fiction in tandem. Participants will be introduced to the history of the study of communication in the United States, including the formation of the field in the early twentieth century and the history of the College of Communication at the University of Texas. Students will learn about how early scholars attempted to situate communication at the center of public education, as well as the assumptions made about idea of communication in doing so. We will be comparing theories of elocution and public speaking, speech hygiene, general semantics, semiotics, and "communications" (e.g., broadcast technology) to the ideas advanced by speculative fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, Bram Stoker, and Stanislaw Lem. We will also be viewing and discussing a number of "hard sci-fi" popular films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris, to see if we can extract the implied theories of communication these advance. Special attention will also be given to government-sponsored attempts to communicate with intelligent life in the universe in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life (SETI), Pioneer, and Voyager programs.

As an honors course, this is a "graduate-style" seminar designed to encourage critical thinking by engaging "big questions," setting-aside the pursuit of specific or practical skills. Students should enroll expecting challenging reading and no definitive answers from the course material. Throughout the semester, students will be expected to formally share their responses and reactions to course material and to help organize class discussion. The seminar will culminate in a rigorous term paper in which each participant develops his or her own answer to the question, "is communication (science) fiction?"

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Fortunately, there's time enough to tinker with the description, and I can think about what books I shall assign for the next . . . [Brief pause: I must remark on the beautiful sunset happening right now in Austin; the skies are overcast with purple clouds, a cheering orange glow peeps around the edges, getting brighter and then dimmer and illuminating this keyboard with kind of slowly pulsating pink light---a sci-fi scene, indeed.] Where was I? Oh, yeah, I have seven months to think about the books to assign and read them.

Although it's still a bit hazy---and it probably should be---the goal of the course is nothing more than what I've already sketched. In part, one could describe the goal as the proverbial "pulling out the rug," as they say. Grads in our college have assumed, from day one, that communication is a thing, event, or process, that it's possible, and that it's mostly positive. Some colleagues teach the "darkside of communication" literature, as its called, but even that work tends to assume (though not all of it) that communication occurs. I think it may be helpful for students (that is, students who want to) to question the fundamental assumptions of our curricula.

To what end?

Well, if I specified that I suppose the course and it's guiding question would not be a seminar, but something else. Even so, purposefully bracketing the point of questioning the assumptions behind the idea of communication, I'm not beyond questioning the point of my going to science fiction as an illustration. My chosen pulp-era magazine covers for this post are deliberate. I worry: to what extent is science fiction a masculine appeal? We know, for example, that the formative marketing of the genre in the states was aimed primarily at adolescent boys and that choice has been lock-step with Hollywood film. Regardless of the merits of the stuff we'll be reading (and there are many), should I worry about a skewed, male enrollment?

I've been thinking about the questions of sci-fi's "male appeal" as I've been reading the "greatest hits" of science fiction from the 50s forward. Much of what I am reading, insofar as it doesn't aspire to art or philosophical reflection, advances a phallocentric and, frankly, racist ideology (and this is not surprising). As I read into the 60s, there's a more self-conscious effort to explore (and explode) gender and race categories, and I appreciate that. Even so, this "male-focused" sense I get reading science fiction is something beyond the marketing, certainly more than the themes of "xenogenesis." Woman is present, indeed, ever-present in her absence (think of Psycho or Fight Club here, but change out the protagonist with Ender or Lem's Prof. Hogarth in His Master's Voice ). I reckon what it comes down to is why does this stuff appeal to me so much? And does that something have to do with masculinity? I suspect it does.

Just thinking aloud, but, I will need to figure out this masculinity issue for myself---beyond an all-too-easy or obvious critique of masculinity chest-beating or anxiety (the adolescent male fear of, attraction to, and oppression by masculinity)---before I teach the course. It may very well be that there is no way to even approach the question of communication's possibility without seriously interrogating gender. Indeed, were I to teach this through a Lacanian lens, the there would be no way out, only through (since communication would be, as it were, poised on sexuation---no desire/need for communion without difference). But this isn't a class from a psychoanalytic vantage.

Yet.